How to Enable the Delete Confirmation Dialog Box In Windows 8

Windows has changed quite a lot since its inception, but the presence of the recycle bin feature hasn’t changed much. Recycle Bin in Windows is there for a reason, e.g. to act like a fail-safe, to save us from accidental deletions and other awkward situations. Speaking of Recycle Bin, previous versions of Windows like XP, Vista and 7 used to display a confirmation dialog box whenever you hit the delete button.

But this has changed in Windows 8; your files are moved to Recycle Bin immediately after pressing the delete button, i.e. you won’t see any delete confirmation dialog box. This feature sure is handy because it saves us another step to perform, but as always this feature is prone to more accidental deletions. To make matters worse, you don’t even know the file is deleted unless you specifically search for it.

So, if you don’t like this step taken by Microsoft, here is a simple solution on how you can enable the delete confirmation dialog box in Windows 8.

Enable the Delete Confirmation Dialog Box In Windows 8

1. To enable the delete confirmation dialog box in Windows 8, we need to change one of the Recycle Bin’s properties. To do that, right click on the Recycle Bin icon on your desktop and select “Properties” from the list.

2. Check the box “Display delete confirmation dialog” and click on the “Apply” and “OK” buttons to save the changes.

That’s all there is to do. From now on Windows 8 will display the delete confirmation dialog box whenever you press the delete button to delete a file or folder.

For some users, the check box “Display delete confirmation dialog” may be grayed out, i.e. you can’t check or uncheck the box. If you are facing this problem, here’s the fix:

To enable “Display delete confirmation dialog box” option in Recycle Bin’s properties, there are two ways. One is by using Windows group policy editor (the easiest way), and the other is by adding keys to Windows registry.

3. Once you are there, find “Display confirmation dialog when deleting files” and double click on it to open it. This action show opens a properties window.

4. Set the value to “Enable” to enable the delete confirmation dialog box and click Apply and OK to save the changes.

Via Registry Editor

1. We can do the same thing as above with Windows registry editor if you can’t access your group policy editor for some reason. To do that, press “Win + R” and type “regedit.” Press enter to open Windows registry editor.